I went down to Paddington tonight to look at the Australian Centre for Photography, an institution which conducts both exhibits and training courses. Afterwards I went to a meet-up down the road in Darlinghurst, and we settled upon the Coco Cubano café which, it may surprise you to learn, has a Cuban theme and viva la revolution, comrades! (Though the staff members are wearing the most neatly pressed revolutionary uniforms I've ever seen.)

The place has a lovely atmosphere, old style, comfortable furniture, and as for the coffee and food... ah, well, er... did I mention the atmosphere and the comfortable furniture?

Anyway, on the walls you'll find a lot of pictures of Cuban residents stretching back to the pre-Fidel days. In particular there's a gallery of them on the wall in the small room at the back of the bar. This one particularly struck me for the way they have the ceiling light focussed on the woman's eyes. As battered and weathered as the photograph is, it was like she was looking out at us, across time and space. I took this from my chair rather than standing up to take it straight on to give some idea of the effect that you see when you're a patron there.
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Edit, August 2023: This was a weird little trip. Bear in mind that Paddington and Darlinghurst are way out of my regular haunts and my knowledge of them was minimal. A main arterial road called Oxford Street runs through both suburbs and to an outsider the border between them can be hard to pick.

I assume that I arrived by bus, and thus my photo trail started opposite Victoria Barracks on Oxford Street near Glenmore Road. I took some shots of a now-closed Irish pub. I then walked back to Darlinghurst (the opposite way to Paddington) and got some shots of the Darlinghurst Courthouse.

From there I doubled back to (presumably) head to the aforementioned Australian Centre for Photography... where I recall that I found nothing of value or interest. And there is even less now. Apparently they put themselves "in hibernation" in 2020 because the backside fell out of their funding as a result of Covid. They flogged off their funds and archives to "Powerhouse" which I presume is the new, funky and obscure name of what was the Powerhouse Museum. (Such as those archives are, anyway; the "past exhibits" on their web page aren't a patch on the best PBase or Flickr collections, in my humble opinion, but with so many 404 errors it's hard to be sure.) This happened on "Tuesday 25 October" because apparently they don't think that a year is a useful piece of information in their press releases. (I presume that it was 2022.)

On the way back I encountered the Paddington Reservoir Gardens, which I will eventually post both the images and story of. Oh, and I also shot masses of bats flying from the Botanic Gardens to Centennial Park (or the other way) for the night.

The "meet up" was (of course) a date, and the result was (of course) what was happening on a regular basis in early 2010. A couple of days earlier I had sent her an e-mail via Online Dating Hell, then settled down to watch a documentary on the engineering of the Titanic (THEEEERE'S your first clue, Sherlock!), and found a really, really enthusiastic reply waiting for me when that finished. Then when we met... she was fine, she was nice, she was nice looking (don't ask me for details because I don't even remember her name, much less those), and within 10 minutes... you know how a meeting can suddenly devolve to a complete lack of connection and you're playing a polite game of 20 questions like it's an interview for a newspaper rather than a date? Yeah, like that.

I had been wearing a stylish grey pinstripe suit that I had forgotten until now I ever owned. I know this because I tried some arty-flarty (sic) style photos of my arm resting on the armrest, with a cup of coffee on the coffee table, and a waiting empty chair on the far side. The visit to the ACP probably had a bad effect on me.

I know that I took public transport because I recall taking a taxi back home after the date. The driver asked me what I had been up to. I said that I was heading home from a date. Big mistake. Biiiiig mistake. He then went on to regale me with the story of his own love life and how the family of the love of his life didn't want him around their daughter and {internal monologue} for the love of the gods, please just shut up, drive and get me home.

Yyyyup, I don't remember anything about her, but even after 13 years I still remember that trip.

Oh, I almost forgot. Coco Cubano at that address lasted until at least mid-2017, but by November of 2018 it was gone. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, there was a Coco Cubano in Wollongong around the same time... which also closed at around the same time. As I recall it was similar to Darlinghurst in that the décor was cool, the coffee was quite decent, and the food was... OK in Wollongong, actually. It wasn't a place to avoid but nor was it a place that you were motivated to come back to either. There are only three stores left in NSW as at the time of writing; Top Ryde, Macarthur Square, and Parramatta.